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Plan 9 Distribution README

Four diskette distribution



The files in this directory recreate the four 1.44MB diskettes used to load a limited version of Plan 9 onto a PC. It is intended to let you try out Plan 9 before buying, in particular to see if the system supports your PC hardware.
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The above files are different from those shipped with the distribution. In particular they contain important changes to fix floppy, hard drive, and vga problems. They also contain a new disk preparation program that doesn't clobber anything on any partition described in a Master Boot Record. The contents of the distributed diskettes can be found in the files disk1.orig, disk{2,3,4}.vd.orig.

Read the document Installing the Plan 9 Distribution for information about these 4 diskettes. Read also the errata list since it has important additional information.

Copying the disk image of disk1 onto a floppy is easy under Plan 9 or Unix: just dd to the raw device. However, we don't know of a standard DOS utility to do this. Nigel Roles, ngr@symbionics.co.uk, has been kind enough to write one: it's in ftp://ftp.cs.york.ac.uk/pub/plan9/putimg.

Also, don@paranoia.com writes:
	I just thought you might like to know that there is another utility out 
	there to do this called RAWRITE.EXE.  It's part of the Slackware Linux 
	distribution installation support files, and consequently is carried on 
	sunsite.unc.edu (/pub/Linux/distributions/slackware/install/RAWRITE.EXE),
	tsx-11.mit.edu, ftp.cdrom.com, and all sites which mirror them.